Chapter 17
AJ stood at the farmhouse sink, wrists deep in suds, rinsing the last traces of salsa from a chipped ceramic bowl.
It was the sort of domestic minutiae he usually relished—orderly, productive, self-contained—except today his mind kept drifting, cluttered with thoughts.
In less than thirty-six hours he would be seeing Poppy.
He assumed she would be attending the rehearsal dinner.
Would they talk? What would they say? Would they address the fact that he’d contacted her a dozen times and she’d not returned any of his messages, or would they pretend nothing ever happened?
For someone who spent his life mirroring other people’s emotions, he wasn’t all that good at pretending when it came to his own, it felt too much like lying to him.
He leaned over and placed the bowl in the dishwasher, and when he shut it, he saw a flicker of movement, barely perceptible, on the periphery of his vision.
He turned and looked out the kitchen window and saw a woman with long, silky brunette hair walking down the street with a little girl with blonde curls and a blocky-headed Rottweiler whose tongue hung from the side of his mouth and was the color of raw meat.
She was a good distance away, but his entire body responded exactly as it had when he was standing on the balcony at Mountain Ridge Resort looking down at the cocktail hour and saw a brunette woman with her back to him.
He blinked hard, twice, as if he was looking at an optical illusion conjured by the late afternoon glare off the smooth marble countertop.
It can’t be, AJ thought to himself, but with each step she took, she confirmed his suspicion. The hair on his forearms stood upright, and he was finding it hard to breathe.
For a paralyzing second, he considered the possibility that he was hallucinating.
His sleep had always been bad, worse than bad, chronically interrupted.
But over the past three months, his circadian rhythm was shredded by the combination of jet lag, heightened external and internal anxiety that included a mental and emotional struggle with moral and ethical responsibility, and the tectonic shifts in his life.
He was aware of this, the way a scientist is aware of the variables in an experiment, and yet it did nothing to lessen the uncanny spike of adrenaline that shot through him as the scene in front of him unfolded.
With each step the trio took, the woman’s face became clearer and clearer, like a mirror being defogged after a shower.
It was her. And just like he felt every time he looked into her eyes at the wedding, that they were entirely alone in a roomful of people, the rest of the world disappeared.
Now, inexplicably, as he stood watching, it felt as if the universe had triangulated their locations with mathematical certainty once again and no one else existed.
AJ must have, in some recess in his mind, expected her to walk up the pathway to his door and knock because when she stopped at the house next door, his heart sank.
The girl threw her backpack onto the grass and began doing cartwheels on the lawn.
AJ heard a man speaking, although he could not see him.
He strained to hear his voice through the thick glass.
It was deep, a baritone that resonated even at a distance.
“Did you have fun at school?” AJ translated the muffled words, catching the cadence if not the substance.
“On the way home we saw two dogs walking down Main Street, and they went to get ice cream! Poppy said that they escaped!” The girl’s voice carried, her tone high-pitched.
For years, there had been a running joke in Hope Falls about the Great Dane and Chihuahua duo, Scooby and Scrappy Doo, that belonged to the Maguire sisters, Amy and Nikki, who AJ and Niko used to hang out with when they were younger.
Amy was reserved, Nikki was wild, and the dogs were notorious for escaping and making their rounds at Two Scoops for complimentary Pup Cups.
AJ felt a flicker of comfort in the constant that was Hope Falls, some things never changed.
“I wanted to get Rocco a Pup Cup, but Poppy said we had to ask you first. Can we?” The girl bounced from one foot to the other.
“Sure.”
AJ watched a man he’d never seen before, who was tall, taller than AJ, maybe six-four, and broad, but carried himself with a casual grace that made him look younger than his probable age, come into view. Brown hair, a blue button-down, sleeves rolled up, and tattoos on his forearms.
The man stepped beside Poppy, standing close—too close, in AJ’s opinion—and said something that made Poppy glance up at him and raise her eyebrows before her head fell back and she laughed.
AJ gripped the edge of the sink so hard his knuckles whitened.
His entire body felt wrong—wrong like an instrument out of tune, or a square peg trying to fit into a round hole.
For the next several seconds he stood there, unmoving, as if his feet were bolted to the tile as he rode out an emotion he was not familiar with and was not pleasant.
Anger, sadness, regret, and hurt all combined and congregated in his chest and stomach.
As someone who was immune to jumping to conclusions, this was a novel experience for him.
His entire life had been an exercise in avoiding the pitfall of assumption, relying instead on observable data, on what could be measured and double-checked and repeated.
In this situation, however, he immediately thought of the worst possible outcome first, as if by rehearsing disaster he could make himself immune to it.
His brain told him that Poppy and the man were in love and they were going to get married.
Did he have proof of that? No, he did not.
It was just as likely that the man who stood beside her was a cousin, a family friend, or an old neighbor.
That the girl was a friend’s daughter, and she was babysitting as a favor.
But AJ felt that this man was someone who she knew intimately. It was just a feeling.
He was doing his best to remind himself of those other possibilities and drown out the noise of the first. He told himself those things in the same way a pilot tells himself the turbulence will stop, intellectually comforting but emotionally useless.
It shouldn’t matter to him, he reminded himself. They spent one night together. That was it. He had no claim on her. She owed him nothing, not even an explanation. And, the truth was, he wanted the best for her. He truly did.
AJ didn’t know how much time had passed that he stood at the window watching the man with Poppy until she bent down and picked up the girl’s backpack, and the trio all disappeared behind the tall shrubbery that separated the property line along the driveway.
He found himself leaning to the left, as if that angle would allow him to see where she was going. It did not.
When she was out of sight, his brain kept looping questions he had no answers to.
Why was Poppy in Hope Falls?
Who was that man?
Why had she picked the girl up from school?
Was he a friend?
Did she live with that man and his child?
And the big one—was he the reason she hadn’t returned his calls or texts?
None of it was relevant at all. Her silence was very loud. She’d made her feelings, or lack thereof, very clear by never responding to him.
He was so lost in his thoughts that when the alarm sounded on his phone, he stared at it for several seconds before remembering what he’d set it for.
“Fuck,” he cursed beneath his breath.
Today could not be over soon enough. A month ago he’d received an email from his commanding officer, Meet with a civilian therapist. Mandatory check-in.
It had sat in his inbox for weeks before he’d clicked on the link to make the appointment.
He’d been in therapy before, but this was different, this was a “mental health evaluation,” a box to be ticked before his discharge could proceed.
He’d expected to be assigned a therapist in uniform, someone who’d speak a common language, but the name on the email was unfamiliar, Dr. Melinda Baxter, PhD, Northwestern, with a background in applied behavior analysis.
He’d googled her, read three articles she’d written, and decided he’d rather stick his head in a beehive than explain his feelings to a civilian.
But orders were orders.
AJ finished wiping down the counters with methodical care, every movement calibrated to burn off adrenaline.
He lined up the glass in the cabinet so it was symmetrical and in a perfectly straight line, refolded the hand towels into tri-folds before hanging them neatly on the oven door handle, and checked and double-checked that all the burners were off.
It was good for him to do menial tasks while he attempted to process the one-two punch of not just seeing Poppy again but seeing her with a man and his daughter and having to speak to a stranger about his feelings and childhood, two of his least favorite topics.
After reminding himself this was just fifty-five minutes of his life, he clicked on the Zoom link, and the waiting room screen filled his monitor.
For a brief moment, he fantasized about closing his laptop and making an excuse why he couldn’t do it, but then, Dr. Baxter’s image appeared.
She had a striking appearance, was in her mid-thirties, had olive skin, and jet black hair in a sharp bob.
Bright green eyes framed by black rectangular glasses perched on a nose that looked recently sunburned.
The wall behind her was an artfully curated grid of diplomas and abstract prints, and her posture suggested a person who had never once reclined in a chair.
She glanced at his name in the lower corner of the screen, then made direct eye contact.
“AJ, hi.”
“Hello.”
“I’m Dr. Baxter, you can call me Melinda.”
Okay, so she was a first-name therapist.